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No, you don't need a merchantg account. PP acts as a money transfer system. They handle any credit card charges (buyer) for you.

I only know of one site that has real-time PP intergration and that's more using PP's cart mechanism than their own. On my E-commerce site we accept PP but it's up to the customer to manual send the PP payment after placing the order.

The downside to PP is that not everyone is a member, and not everywill will every be a member. People aren't going to go through the whole sign up process just to purchase one item one time from you.

So while I think accepting PP is a good extra, don't count on it to replace a merchant account (regular credit card processing).

I have PayPal set up as the sole payment solution for one of my clients' sites, www.SpiritMeats.com

I've been trying to find an affordable CC processor to act as the primary payment option, but so far people have had little difficulty using PayPal as the only option.

And I use Dansie Cart for my shopping cart solution; far more powerful than anything offered by PayPal directly, and it works with most CC processors, so you're not just stuck with the one PayPal offers!

"A small group of thoughtful people could change the world.
Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." --Margaret Mead

You can use revecom.com or 2checkout.com. I signed up with both. I also use paypal. I was using paypal only and a lot of people did not complete the payment. Paypal is ok except the membership process and it is bad for international payments, even Canadian. I wish they would make it easier for business accounts and make it faster for business payments. Customers don't want to go thorough all of that and they just leave. I really don't know what the difference between their business and personal account is in terms of payment processing, except that business accounts have a cost.

Anyway, about the other two I don't know a lot as I just signed up with them and have had a handful of transactions.